Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! Hands-on

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It has the longest title imaginable. It's also a lot of fun.

By Ryan Clements

Fans of NIS know that the company is never afraid to publish a quirky title. After making a significant impact on US gamers with the launch of the original Disgaea for the PS2, NIS has published a number of other titles that usually uphold the company tradition: be quirky and be fun ("fun" can occasionally be substituted with "hardcore"). With that in mind, the company's upcoming PSP dungeon game shouldn't come as a surprise. It boasts one of the longest titles in recent memory and its quirkiness is equally baffling. Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? is an intriguing mix of dungeon-creation and Dig Dug-style gameplay, all under the retro coat of bright pixels and gaming in-jokes.

Badman is much less confusing than it actually sounds. In the world of Badman, you are the God of Destruction -- which boils down to being a disembodied pickaxe. You've been summoned by the Overlord to help him take over the world. But first, he has to rid his beautiful, healthy dungeon of all the pesky heroes that are killing his monsters and stealing his gold. So this time around, you're helping the bad guy... though he doesn't seem so bad to me...

The entire game is presented in a completely old-school style, with heavily pixelated visuals and cute medieval tunes that instantly bring JRPG memories to your mind. Everything in Badman is displayed on a 2D plane, with your blocky dungeon sprawled out in several layers underground. Your only real interaction is to move the pickaxe cursor around and hit Square, which destroys the currently selected block. That's it. Sure, you can also hit Triangle to zoom out/in and tap X to get a status update on the object underneath your cursor, but that's trivial stuff. Digging up dirt is all you have to do.

In that sense, Badman is an incredibly simple game. And yet it manages to be insanely difficult and complex. The raw "gameplay" of the experience comes from managing your dungeons ecosystem, which includes balancing out the monsters that roam within and the nutrients and mana that flow through the rocks. In the Story mode of Badman, your task is to protect the (defenseless) Overlord from the invading heroes. If they manage to grab him, they'll proceed to drag him back up to the surface. If they succeed, it's a total Game Over for you. You have to start from the beginning of the game.

There's plenty of training missions, thankfully, which will help you get your bearings on the elaborate ecosystem management that exists in the Badman world. For example, the most basic of monsters, the Slimemoss, absorbs soil nutrients and carries them elsewhere. These delightful blobs appear when you break open a nutrient-rich block and they'll move around slowly and only turn when they hit a wall. This allows the dungeon's nutrients to flow throughout the underground maze.

When enough nutrients gather in one single block, you can break that block open and a small Omnom will pop out. These skeletal bugs devour Slimemosses, which allows them to grow into Omnom Flies (which in turn produce more Omnoms). This food chain is quite extensive, as there are numerous monsters to create and the system must be kept balanced. Once again, you have no control over these monsters' actions. You simply design the best possible dungeon for them to inhabit -- and defend.

Even though your interaction with Badman is limited, I already found myself feeling quite addicted to its charming gameplay mechanics. The experience is made even better when you read all the hilarious text that's usually uttered by the Overlord himself, which plays off of a gamer's knowledge quite brilliantly.

I'm very excited to continue working on this game, as the invading heroes kicked my ass shortly after entering my dungeon. Clearly I have a lot to learn about this quirky title, but I'll hopefully have much more dungeon know-how when the game ships this July.